


brother of the earth, brother of the blood

by quoixej



Category: Persona 5
Genre: Abuse, Blood, Body Horror, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Suicide, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-02
Updated: 2020-12-02
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:28:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27835282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quoixej/pseuds/quoixej
Summary: Goro wakes up on Tuesday afternoon, in a dust storm clogging up his nose, and a room swarmed with stacks of paper he has yet to fill out. He makes coffee, he takes a shower, he brushes his teeth. Orderly, correct, perfect.Goro does not make it to bed.
Relationships: Akechi Goro & Kurusu Akira, Akechi Goro & Persona 5 Protagonist, Akechi Goro & Phantom Thieves of Hearts, Akechi Goro/Kurusu Akira, Akechi Goro/Persona 5 Protagonist
Comments: 2
Kudos: 21





	brother of the earth, brother of the blood

**Author's Note:**

> tw /// blood, mentions of suicide, body horror, implied abuse, implied child abuse, implied attempted suicide.

Goro wakes up on Tuesday afternoon in a dust storm clogging up his nose, and a room swarmed with stacks of paper. He doesn’t go back to bed that night. 

\- 

Goro, in life, believes in simplicity. Nothing should be complicated if you sit down and think about it for more than two seconds. No problem in life is unsolvable, unless you believe it is. (He seems to come up with rather unsavory solutions, but solutions, still). Goro also believes in violence, in blood being the very thing that binds him to the Earth. 

So, he’s not afraid to spill it on the soil once in a while. The sight of red (blood) has since his childhood become a necessity to survive, whether it be tripping over a rock while running from bullies, or nicking himself on a thin piece of paper. Either way, the blood seems inviting most days - calming, stabilizing. The metaverse has long since stopped scaring him - the dark corridors and lurking monsters just seem to prove his point: blood is of the essence. Blood is of the soul, blood is the one thing he shares with Shido.

Goro is a child of Blood, first and foremost. 

Goro is used to running - his legs burn, most days, and sometimes he drops to his feet and has to crawl. It’s easy, not that his problems scare him. But rather, his feet only know the pounding of the ground burning his legs, driving the needles that rest on his feet even deeper. 

Goro wakes up on Tuesday afternoon, in a dust storm clogging up his nose, and a room swarmed with stacks of paper he has yet to fill out. He makes coffee, he takes a shower, he brushes his teeth. Orderly, correct, perfect. Everything he wishes he could be. He takes a look into the mirror - his red eyes are puffy. One could see him and jump to many assumptions - he cannot have that. 

The ice in his fridge is cold, and he shivers once his skin comes in contact with the perfect cubes. They slowly melt upon his eyes - a bad practice, but one that’s come to work after years of practice. Goro’s eyes are still sore, from hours of misuse - the contacts in his eyes are paining after weeks of overuse, and his new batch has yet to come in. His cursed glasses were broken in half last time he checked, so he really doesn’t know where to go from there. 

Goro - goro’s not very interesting. He looks like any other teen in Japan, and is basically known for having one of the most boring personalities ever. (Well, the Phantom Thieves seem to think so. He doesn’t really care about anyone else’s opinion). Goro has a dead mom, a very-close-to-being-dead dad, and his apparently not very dead crush. Goro works a day job from 7:00 to 8:00 everyday. He sleeps. He wakes up. He goes into the metaverse. He sleeps. 

Goro, in life, believes in simplicity. Sometimes, however, he thinks his life might be too simple. 

-  
Goro’s mother, age 28, died on a Tuesday morning. To be more specific, November 29th. Goro himself does not remember much about it - he was the one who found the dead body, hanging from the ceiling - he wishes he could forget, most days. 

Autumn has always been his least favorite season. Cold, dreary. Everything his mother was not - it’s slightly fitting, no matter how morbid, that she died right when the rain started pouring and Goro rushed from home to school to show his mother his first tooth that fell off, blood pouring from his mouth. 

(He spent hours trying to rub it out till his gums were bleeding when he saw the body.)

Today is the first day of Autumn. Goro is not happy at all. 

\- 

(When Goro shoots Akira point blank in the head, all he really remembers is his mother’s dead body. He’s not very keen on it - it’s just what he remembers every time he takes a life. Yet, somehow, the blood makes him take a step back, and then one more. And then he is running down the hallway past a dead body, remembering the splatter of red, and the wide eyes. Goro does the one thing he’s been doing since he was a child - run.)

\- 

Autumn, in many ways, is a choke-hold. The air does not leave him, literally, of course. However, most days, the weather feels suffocating - almost as if something was missing. Autumn is solemn, autumn makes Goro infuriated - not in himself, but in the very street he walks upon, and the child that passes him on a bike. 

In Winter, Goro becomes sluggish. The days melt into each other, like dirty water mixed in with mud. His pillow feels like a rock, his bed like a prison. His popularity is at an all time high - praise coming in from all corners of the world for “defeating” the Phantom Thieves. He doesn’t really feel like he’s won much, other than more nightmare fodder that haunts him at the strike of midnight. 

He remembers Akira the spring this year. It was a rather beautiful spring - the Sakura fell onto his hair, and yet he could not find it in him to be annoyed. He remembers everything, from the detail of Morgana peeking through the bag with his face showing as it did when he was at Leblanc and Akira entered the store. (At an ungodly hour, most of the time.) 

If Goro had to say, the past half-year has been the happiest of his life. 

Winter, in a way, is mocking. It is everything spring is not - cold, bleary, and sluggish. It’s almost as if the days are blips in time, and what he does one day will not affect anything he does the next.  
His lips are chapped, and his chapstick has been worn down to the very bottom of it. It’s cherry-flavored - his mother used to love cherries. Cherry medicine, cherry chapstick, cherry flavored sweets - his mother smelt of cherries whenever he came home after a hard math test or a day of getting in trouble with his rather rude teachers. 

His blankets are dirty, and his cups are dusty. The only food in his fridge is leftover takeout from 2 days ago, and some suspiciously moldy cheese - he’s been living off of an unhealthy amount of coffee and order in. The oil in his skin is not healthy - nor is it really approving of the image he has so carefully curated under Shido’s eyes. 

His blood is still the color of the dark red velvet chapstick his mother had once used, the first time Goro saw his mother and thought about how beautiful he wanted to be, just like her. The memory stays seared into his brain on even the best of days, even when Goro is smiling a crooked smile that has his fans tripping over their own legs, and even when he hangs out with his one friend from school that treats him less like Goro Akechi and more like the prestigious Detective Prince. In a way, in all the books he reads, he only ever sees people talking about wanting to take off a mask - a mask that separates them from their real selves, a mask that keeps them from moving on with their daily life. 

Goro does not wish the same.

\- 

In a way, the Detective Prince is much more kind than Goro’s actual personality. The Detective Prince is calm, Goro is not. The Detective Prince is planned, Goro is not. The Detective Prince is charming, Goro is not.

Goro does not understand why people love the Detective Prince, a title stolen from someone who deserved it much more. Goro does not wish to understand, in a selfish, shallow way. To him - he doesn't care why people love him, but rather in what quantity. Almost as if he is a thirsty traveler in the middle of a desert, until he spots an oasis. 

That love, to him, is an oasis.

His mother’s love was in a way, suffocating. Not because she was a bad person, but rather because of how strongly she loved him. And how strongly he loved her, until he came across a pool of blood and her too skinny face lying with it. He tried to clean her hair out himself, he remembers suddenly, with his too small hands and too innocent eyes. 

Goro’s hands suddenly reek of blood, stained red. He runs to his tiny restroom and everything is red. And all he remembers is red, the blood, his gloves, the blood, the blood that stains his hands right now, even as he scrubs and scrubs, the red of the Phantom Thieves, and the blood will not go away. 

Goro looks up to the mirror. Goro looks to his hands.

Goro does not make it to the bed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello ! this is chapter one of brother of blood (imma just call it that it's too long to type it), and i hope to see if you guys like it. either way, this is kinda just a thought i got in my head - i do have somewhat of a plot in head, but forgive me if it takes a while to update. i am in school and quarantine sucks lol. 
> 
> to clarify, i have played p5 and p5r. i am a certified goro akechi lover, and this is gonna be nice for me to write. i apologize if it's dark - i'm not really sure, even after reading fanfiction for over 7 years, it's kinda hard. 
> 
> please leave reviews if you will, you don't need to! writing is just a fun free time i've picked up on. 
> 
> if you want to contact me, the only way is twitter: quoixej. i am not french. please keep in mind i am a minor.


End file.
